U.S. nears 100K deaths: Does Trump feel your pain?
WASHINGTON — In the rubble of buildings and lives, modern U.S. presidents have met national trauma with words such as these: “I can hear you.” “You have lost too much, but you have not lost everything.” “We have wept with you; we’ve pulled our children tight.”
As diverse as they were in eloquence and empathy, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama each had his own way of piercing the noise of catastrophe and reaching people.
But now, the known U.S. death toll from the coronavirus pandemic is fast approaching 100,000 on the watch of a president whose communication skills, potent in a political brawl, are not made for this moment.
Impeachment placed one indelible mark on Trump’s time in office. Now there is another, a still-growing American casualty list that has exceeded deaths from the Vietnam and Korean wars combined. U.S. fatalities from the most lethal hurricanes and earthquakes pale by comparison. This is the deadliest pandemic in a century.
Actual deaths from COVID-19 are almost certainly higher than the numbers show, an undercount to be corrected in time.
At every turn Trump has asserted the numbers would be worse without his leadership. Yet the toll keeps climbing. It is well beyond what he told people to expect even as his publichealth authorities started bracing the country in early April for at least 100,000 deaths.
“I think we’ll be substantially under that number,” he said April 10.“Ten days later: ”We’re going toward 50- or 60,000 people.“Ten days after that: “We’re probably heading to 60,000, 70,000.”
The scale and swiftness of the pandemic’s killing are unlike anything that confronted Trump’s recent predecessors. Yet the calamity offers no where-were-you moment — no flashpoint turning blue skies black, no fusillade at an elementary school. Instead the toll unfolds in stages of sickness.
The pandemic is playing out in a divided country under a president who thrives on rousing his supporters and getting a rise out of those who don’t like him, whether that means forgoing a mask, playing golf while millions hunker down or thrashing opponents on Twitter. He lowered flags to half staff to recognize those who have died from the virus but had them back up days before the 100,000 marker was reached.
His feelings on Tuesday? He tweeted to “all the political hacks out there” that without his leadership the lives lost would be far worse than the “100,000 plus that looks like will be the number.”
Early on, when only a few hundred had died, Trump was asked at a briefing what message he had for Americans who were scared. “You’re a terrible reporter, that’s what I say,” he responded. “I think it’s a very nasty question.”
In the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Conn., and other national nightmares that brought flags to half staff, presidents found more soothing words for the frightened and grieving than Trump’s boilerplate line that one death is too many.
Empathy was Clinton’s wheelhouse. The rhetorically fumbly Bush grabbed eloquence by the bullhorn. The cool and controlled Obama cried.
Trump? “I’ve never seen a president with less capacity for empathy,” said Andrew J. Polsky, a political science professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, who has studied such leadership traits for decades. “He doesn’t even try. … It’s way outside his emotional comfort zone.“
Clinton’s touchy-feely ways are forever symbolized by his assurance that “I feel your pain,“which did not come from a tragic moment at all but rather an epic smackdown of a heckler. Challenged by an AIDS activist in New York in 1992 who said the Democratic candidate was more about ambition than achievement, Clinton told the man “I know how it hurts … I feel your pain” but “quit talking to me like that.”
“I’m sick and tired of all these people who don’t know me, know nothing about my life … making snotty-nosed remarks about how I haven’t done anything in my life,” Clinton told the crowd and the activist.
But Clinton’s remarks as president at the memorial service for the victims of the Oklahoma City domestic terrorist attack in 1995 exemplified compassionate leadership and helped dig him out of a political hole.
“You have lost too much, but you have not lost everything,” he told the bereaved families. “And you have certainly not lost America, for we will stand with you for as many tomorrows as it takes.”